"Create" combines the disciplines of Music, Media and Drama and increasingly having been to High Tech High and having made a journey from tentative baby steps of pilots to robust tuning and refining we are beginning to realise the vision we had for Create when we sat at Muffin Mansion (read Longhirst Hall) almost five years ago.
Initially we were incredibly naive and expected to be able to allow the students to be almost entirely self determinate, big mistake! Over time we have learned that choice is OK, provided that it is framed thoughtfully and in a way that encourages independence through a gentle removal of scaffolding as students progress through the key stage.
Aside from ageing (in technological terms) PCs, the biggest barrier we have faced in the last couple of years has been in finding ways to implement PBL in a way that allows for professionally high quality outcomes.
The realisation has been that teachers need to spend more time with less students.
We have two 75 minute periods per week, with 6 classes of roughly 30 on session at once, split between 2 Media, 2 Music and 2 Drama teachers.
In it's original incarnation, Create was basically a carousel. Each class had a Create tutor who was their guide and would introduce enquiries (as they were then; rather than projects) and monitor home learning. Students rotated between the disciplines each lesson and each cycle was punctuated by a generic "Create tutor" lesson related to the enquiry and so learning was transient and often not of the quality we aim for.
A typical unit looked like this:
The enquiries were developed largely to ensure breath of content for the National Curriculum in Music, and other examples were:
What would Beethoven think of rock 'n' roll? Where students learned to perform music from both eras and made short dramatic pieces supposing that Beethoven had time travelled a la Bill & Ted (fine film!)
Can the camera tell the truth? Where students made comic books of still images to tell a story, with a soundtrack.
Looking back, our intentions were noble enough but in reality our enquiry questions were like lubing a steak and hoping to cram it down a National Curriculum shaped straw. We allowed ourselves to become hamstrung by notions of external pressure that were largely non-existent in reality.
The learning was also in two parts, lots of short enquiries or lessons, followed by some making of a product. (More like project orientated learning rather than project based learning)
Another issue was that at the time we felt the need to include all three disciplines in each enquiry which led to some square peg round hole shenanigans and usually one discipline became marginalised with a tacked on role.
Whilst there were some really great lessons, students did not really but in as the things we asked them to create were mostly abstracted from what creative artists produce in the real world. Students perceived little value in them and as a result the enquiries suffered.
The first changes I made the following year when I took over the department were to get rid of bespoke home learning for each enquiry which was unwieldy in terms of monitoring and workload in creating the tasks. Instead students were asked to keep a journal of their learning, reflecting upon what they had learned, how they had been Creative (ICEDIP, more on this below) and including examples of their learning. Students could choose how to keep their journal, for example as a scrap book, or in a song, the idea was to be creative in presenting your response.
I also brought in Geoff Petty's research on the ICEDIP model for creativity to help students understand that creativity is a not a rigid process and can be learned.
Finally, we moved from rotating every lesson to having blocks of four lessons with each teacher, which made much more sense. This has endured to some extent in the first two terms of Year 7, where students need some element of "tooling up" to prepare them for the enquiries ahead.
That was three years ago and Create has continued to evolve. In my next post I will discuss how we have moved to PBL rather than EBL, and how we are dealing with structuring the terms so that we see less students for longer.
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